With a laser focus on making a great product, the team at Sloos asked us to help them build and design the next go-to app for finding the best local offers.
Sloos’s free app would deliver live, limited time offers directly to your phone from local venues nearby, including dining spots to concerts, attractions, and more. We quickly realized this was a gem, ready to be cut and polished.
The challenge with Sloos was how we would create a product engaging enough to help venues increase offline engagement, and get customers in stores.
After a few brainstorming sessions with the client and discussions around possible features, it became clear we should go with an MVP version, releasing the app to the market faster, and learning from early users. We would focus on the most value-rich features, with a single flow for the initial deploy.
From the beginning, it was clear for both us and the client the need to create something out of the box, something fresh and special. The beginning of the process was crucial to get everyone on the right mindset and make sure we got the right path from the get-go.
Starting from a set of Wireframes shared by the client and several explorations later, we achieved a solid starting point, combining a strong experience with polished and friendly visuals.
As a true MVP approach, it was imperative that the mindset was clear: Thinking scalable. Sloos was set to launch and keep evolving throughout the years so we had to make sure the look & feel not only got people excited about redeeming offers, but also fresh enough to resist the inevitable evolution of design trends.
Sloos had to feel fresh, bright, exciting and its bright approach reflects just that. With some iterations, we ended up with a combination of a vivid teal for the main color and a fruity orange for the actions that needed the given prominence.
The main idea in the development of Sloos was to simplify processes to quickly release the app into the market, but to also enable users to quickly start using the app.
The integration of existing services and APIs, like Apple Maps, Facebook and Facebook Pages, really played a crucial role in this. For example, we used Facebook Login to simplify the login process, and without having them go through a tedious registration process.
With scalability in mind, and given the product's typology, it was important that its infrastructure would be able to support peak traffic loads. To distribute the incoming traffic network without ever neglecting the app's performance, we decided to go for an infrastructure that would include auto-scaling Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Relational Database System (RDS) was used to operate and backup a Postgres database instance smoothly, while Simple Notification System (SNS) was used so that they could receive notifications every time an offer from a local spot was nearby.
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For any product, the real test starts right after it is released into the market. For Sloos, it began when the app was first introduced to venue owners, from whom we were able to collect insightful feedback.
At this point, the challenge turned out to be deciding what features should be prioritized, and which would have a bigger impact with local customers. We introduce a feature ideation step focused on the user needs, accessing their value using an ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease of Implementation) framework, and defining an MVP approach per feature to speed up the shipping time.
As a startup, working remotely on a Design and Development project of this size seemed daunting at first, but the team at Pixelmatters is constantly rising to the challenge and giving us unparalleled insight into growing Sloos. I feel fortunate to call this passionate, talented group of people, my partner.
Sheena Monk
Founder of Sloos
We’ve officially launched Sloos in November 2019, quickly turning a rough idea into an app that looks fresh, and out of the box. But launching the app wasn't an end in itself. Sloos is still on a path of continuous iteration and improvements, with valuable feedback leading the way to grow.
